TechCrunch
Movile Launches PlayKids TV, Its Own Video App Just For Kids
Let’s face it: Video content for kids is a big business, with video distributors like Netflix and Amazon seeking to get the next generation of viewers hooked on their services. Mobile entertainment company Movile is getting in on the action as well, with a kid-focused video app called PlayKids TV.
Movile has had a long history of licensing and distributing content for mobile devices in Latin America, but for the most part that meant getting text and video onto phones that weren’t exactly smart. Nowadays, not only is Movile working to make apps for smartphones and tablets, but it’s also targeting a global market rather than just its native Latin America market.
PlayKids fits that initiative perfectly, as it is available to anyone who has kids — or, well, anyone who loves kids content. The app is built for tablets, and for kids’ interactions with them. When you open the app, you’re introduced to a train, with a series of cars and characters riding in each one. Each character represents a different program, and when selected, they take the viewer into the car for a peek into the different videos available to them.
Interestingly enough, videos are downloaded, not streamed. That’s because kids, as we all know, love to watch the same things over and over and over and over and over again. Rather than having that content using up precious mobile data bandwidth, or streaming over a WiFi connection, children just download an episode once, and they can access it whenever — even if they don’t have a data connection.
While it’s free to download, the PlayKids app does have a revenue plan. Kids can watch one episode from each character, basically as much as they want. But if they want to see more, the family has to be subscribed to the service. In doing so, it’s hoping to get parents to sign up for a monthly subscription, which will give their kids access to multiple episodes from each series or character.
Currently there are five train wagons/characters/series available for kids, but Movile is looking to add more content over time. It’s working with international content partners currently to license kids’ videos, targeting the under-5 set. It also plans to rotate different characters and shows through the app, so that the content is always kept new and fresh.
On Its 2-Year Anniversary, Onswipe Says It Has Delivered Tablet Content To 125M+ iOS Users
To celebrate the second anniversary of its launch, touch publishing startup Onswipe is releasing its first Onswipe Sage report, offering data on who’s actually reading its publishers’ content.
The big number, which is both a nice bragging point for Onswipe and a sign that its data has some broader significance, is 127,733,480 — that’s how many iOS users the company has has served in the past two years (as of last night, at least). Back in December, CEO and co-founder Jason Baptiste said that Onswipe was serving 10 million monthly active users, and he told me that number is now in the “tens of millions,” but this is the first time Onswipe has released a total user count.
There are a couple of caveats here. First, Onswipe doesn’t offer a consumer product, so these counts are largely a measure of the Onswipe publishers’ reach — someone who’s counted as an Onswipe user might not think of themselves that way.
Second, you’ll note that it’s iOS-only. Onswipe has added support for Android tablets and Kindle Fire, but Baptiste said they account for just a “tiny” part of the platform’s total usage. That’s backed up later in the report, which said that according to monthly unique visitors, 94.1 percent of Onswipe’s tablet traffic comes from iPads, versus 4.1 percent from the Fire and 1.8 percent from Android.
“On tablets, iOS is just where we’re putting all of our time,” Baptiste said. He noted that Onswipe can track the different types of tablet traffic coming to a publisher’s website, so the team can look at the data and figure out if it’s worth the time to support a new platform. “Do we think that could happen? Sure, but there’s nothing that’s telling us it’s going to happen anytime soon.”
He added that on the smartphone side, Onswipe now supports iPhones and plans to add Android support soon.
The other big debate in mobile/tablet publishing is apps versus the web. Onswipe has bet on the web — it builds tablet- and smartphone-optimized websites, not downloadable apps. Baptiste said readers can still access its content through apps like Facebook, Twitter, and Flipboard. Nonetheless, it’s probably not surprising that Onswipe sees 67.7 percent higher engagement (measured in pageviews per visit) in the browser than through apps. Perhaps related, Baptiste said that visitors who arrive via search have 32 percent higher engagement than those who arrive via social.
A couple more fun stats: The report says the top US city for Onswipe is New York, followed Los Angeles and Chicago. Onswipe traffic peaks at 10pm, and the most popular days are Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.
Baptiste said Onswipe will be start a Sage report every month. You can read the first one below.
Onswipe 127433480 Users Sage June 2013 by TechCrunch
Supreme Court Cuts Voting Rights Act, But Online Voter Tools Could Boost Minority Turnout
There’s no reason to be entirely glum about the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down provisions of the Voting Rights Act: the growing accessibility of online voting and registration spells good things for traditionally marginalized groups. As I’ve written about before, California’s experiment in online voter registration had (surprisingly) the biggest impact on Latino voters. And the eventual arrival of online voting itself could herald a big win for minority voters who often have to wait longer in lines and have a harder time taking Tuesdays off to get to the voting station.
For a bit of background, the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 helped usher in a new era of civic equality by requiring states, especially those in the South prone to racist legal barriers, to seek preclearance from the Justice Department to ensure they didn’t intentionally discriminate. However, the South has made significant progress since its Klan-hosting days, and many Republicans felt that preclearance was an unfair burden to southern states.
Others argue that the regional GOP’s transparent attempt to prevent Democratic minorities from voting with rules such as mandatory voter ID is a good reason to uphold oversight of southern states. In today’s Shelby County v. Holder, 5 of 9 justices struck down preclearance as unconstitutional. Wonkblog has a thorough post about why the Voting Rights Act, especially the redistricting components designed to ensure greater minority representation, does not necessarily advance minority issues in Congress.
Regardless of the Voting Rights Act decision, there’s cause for (techno) optimism. “Advocates for online registration argued that it would make the registration process more open and accessible to a broader range of voters. Our analysis suggests this reform was successful in that regard,” wrote Lisa García Bedolla and Verónica N. Vélez of the Berkeley Center for Latino Policy Research, who found that California’s pilot in online voter registration had the greatest participation, per population, from Latinos.
“When we make the process easier, like letting you register after you Google it on your phone, folks participate,” they further explained to the Huffington Post.
The biggest impact may come when we have fully online voting, so that minority voters can cast a ballot from their smartphones without having to worry about long lines, getting off work or legal barriers at the voting booth. It’s too soon to tell how big this impact will be since online voter registration is still in its infancy here in the U.S. Also, only a few countries allow online voting, so we don’t yet know its full impact on a global scale.
Zumbl.com Is Like Chatroulette Without The Privates
Remember Chatroulette? That was a good time. Anyway, two IIT Delhi computer science students, Abhishek Gupta and Saurabh Kumar have created a chat system that allows you to find random people based on your interests. Unlike competitors like Omegle, Zumbl.com aims to match people with rooms containing folks who tend to like the same things, be they knitting, self abuse, or sci-fi.
Obviously the site is a little quiet right now – the pair have seen about 3,000 users in the past few days – but they’re pretty bullish on the idea: they dropped out of college to enter the Digital Media Zone, Toronto incubator in 2012.
“We are going a step further from Facebook Graph Search where we not only give people the ability to search for other people of their choice but also, a way to contact them,” said Gupta.
The service focuses on avatars that grow as you use the service.
“Our idea of avatars is one of its kind where the avatar of a person evolves on the basis of his/her behavior unlike the conventional marketplaces offered by imvu.com. More precisely, after a conversation the tags that one receives as a part of the feedback from the other users shapes his avatars. This ensures that the avatars add meaningful value to the profiles.”
One clever hack they’ve added is a Snake-like game that you play while waiting for people to chat with. It’s a nice time-waster before you waste a little time chatting.
The team has raised $20,000 from the CEO of Snapdeal, Kunal Bahl, to help support the 8 member student team and they accepted $20,000 in 2012 from the Digital Media Zone. They are seeing 450,000 messages per day in 15,000 chats, a good number for a site still in alpha.
“During my first year at college, someone introduced me to Omegle.com while I was looking for portals to chat with strangers. It required you to talk profanely or switch on your webcam or pretend to be an American girl to strike a conversation. As an experiment, I started working with two friends on a facebook application to let users chat meaningfully,” said Gupta. “Since then, we have pivoted in small ways according to the user feedback, highly inspired by the ideas of a Lean Startup.”
Thus far folks have been pretty nice on the site. Because you can up or downvote users and add tags to folks who are less than savory, the team has found that the tone of the chats has been solidly nice.
“Zumbl has been able to maintain the culture,” said Gupta. He hopes it stands up to the onslaught of users as the site scales up.
Thalmic Takes A Cue From Google, Launches #ifihadMYO Campaign To Give Away MYO Armbands
Thalmic Labs, the Waterloo startup behind the upcoming MYO armband motion control device, is giving away five of its devices, to be delivered to the lucky winners early next year. The campaign may seem familiar, since it’s called “#ifihadMYO,” which is a direct lift of Google’s recent #ifihadGlass Twitter-based giveaway of its own wearable tech product.
Google Glass and Thalmic’s MYO offer similar quandaries to their respective creators: these are crazy new gadgets that have little or no precedents in terms of shipping consumer devices, and people aren’t quite sure what to make of them. The #ifihad mechanic is uniquely well suited to this, as it crowdsources reasons for the device to exist. This sparks both developer and consumer imaginations, providing use cases that even Thalmic themselves (or an ad agency paid to create a similar campaign) likely never would’ve come up with on their own.
Thalmic’s process when determining winners is a little more transparent than Google’s too, as it will be featuring a live stream of all the entries on its website, and will allow viewers to upvote their top picks. That’s not the final say in voting, however; Thalmic says that it will consider user votes when picking winners, but ultimately the decision will rest with Thalmic Labs judges.
So far, there are already a few entries, including people who want to plug it into RC cars to help get kids interested in coding, using it in tandem with Google Glass, and building gesture-based passwords for physical locks. All in all, some pretty good ideas emerging, and there’s likely many more to come between now and the contest close date of August 31. So far, the company has racked up over 30,000 pre-orders for its device, so there’s definitely an appetite out there; this contest will help provide a better idea of what all those people are going to be able to do with their MYOs.
BabyList, A Universal Baby Registry Built By An Ex-Amazon Developer & Mom, Raises $650K
BabyList, the online universal baby registry which lets couples request unconventional items – like diaper service subscriptions, for example – in addition to gifts from around the web, has raised $620,000 in seed funding from 500 Startups, Okapi Venture Capital, Altair Capital, Chris Messina, Mike Greenfield (co-founder of Circle of Moms), and Mike Seiman.
The service was founded by former Amazon software developer Natalie Gordon, whose son is now just over 2 years old. She says she was inspired to create BabyList out of a frustration with the current products in this space, noting also that “if more women were coding, there would be a much better baby registry experience.”
Gordon launched the site just two weeks before giving birth, but for the first year, it remained something of a side project, only getting around an hour per day of her attention. But after participating in the latest 500 Startups program, she’s now devoted to the startup full-time.
In her case, Gordon said she found the prospects of wandering around a big box store like Babies R Us armed with a scan gun intimidating as an expectant mother. She didn’t know what some of those baby products filling the shelves even were, much less if she needed them. But she did know that she would want someone to walk her dog during those first few months, and she knew she would be trying cloth diapers, so a subscription to a diaper service would be useful, too.
But registries today don’t let you add requests like those, nor do they typically let you register for items across multiple stores. (One exception being Amazon’s universal gift list, of course, but it wasn’t custom-designed for baby products.)
Gordon explains that the difference between BabyList’s product and Amazon’s own universal list is the experience. “With Amazon’s specifically, all the non-Amazon items have smaller images and are at the very bottom of your registry,” she says. “We let you put your items in whatever order you want to put them in. And we’re trying to help you figure out what you really need, and help you find great products.”
With a browser bookmarklet, BabyList’s users can add items to their custom lists from anywhere on the web – including larger retailers like Babies R Us, Amazon, IKEA, Walmart or Target, for example, but also from other sources like Etsy, Giggle, or Crate & Barrel-owned The Land of Nod.
Giggle and Land of Nod will now also power a new, curated product catalog BabyList now launching into beta, which also includes content from Jessica Alba’s The Honest Company, plus ten pilot Etsy shops, and other Amazon products.
Since its initial launch, BabyList users have added over 900,000 to their registries. The site has also attracted 10,000 users this year alone. Having generated word-of-mouth interest from mommy bloggers and Pinterest, the latter which is the service’s number one social media site for user acquisition, the now three-person startup will focus on building a complimentary mobile app to accompany the main website. This app will also include the new curated item catalog, says Gordon.
In the meantime, interested expectant moms – or dads, if you choose! Really! If we can work, you can care about parenting! Lean in, dads! – can sign up for BabyList here.
Livestream Combines Live Video Broadcasting And Viewing In Its Latest App
Livestream has benefitted from the growth in both mobile viewing and broadcasting, but it’s decided to combine those functions into a singular app. That app also has been updated with features to make broadcasting better, and to notify users when new streams from their favorite producers are actually live.
When you first open the new Livestream app, it prompts you to follow friends that use the platform, as well as brands and video publishers that you might be interested in. By creating a list of channels to follow, you’re not only sharing your interest with Livestream, but you will be notified when those channels have new content to share. It does so with push notifications, both when events are added to a calendar and when they go live.
The whole thing goes from being channel-focused — i.e. jumping back and forth through different channels to see what’s new — to being event-focused. By doing so, Livestream is highlighting just what is current and online and interesting, rather than showing viewers a bunch of channels that might be offline.
Livestream users can also search through and discover the most popular live events happening when they open the app. And, of course, archived, on demand videos are available as well. The app also enables viewers to chat with other viewers who have tuned in, and to share streams that they’re watching with all of their favorite social networks and with friends by email.
On the broadcasting side, Livestream has greatly improved the quality of streams that come from the mobile app. In order to do so, it optimized using a software codec that maximizes video compression for streaming, even in low-bandwidth areas. Livestream CEO Max Haot told me by phone that, using adaptive bit rate technology, the app should be able to broadcast with 100 kbps of bandwidth available or less, making it possible to stream live over WiFi, LTE, or even 3G networks.
The app includes other new features while broadcasting — like the addition of filters, as well as the ability to pinch to zoom. Broadcasters can also chat with their viewers, even while streaming. And they can post photos, video, and text to their events any time.
Livestream isn’t the only company going after the mobile broadcasting market. There’s also Ustream, which has its own Broadcast For Friends app for streaming video live from your phone. For now, Livestream’s combined viewing and broadcasting app is only available for iPhone, but it’s testing out an Android version, and is looking to build an app optimized for tablets soon as well.
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